Perhaps you were one of the gamers who, back in 2007, took a chance on an unknown IP and invested $60 in Realtime World’s Crackdown, or perhaps you were one who vehemently refused to shell out that much, “just to get into the Halo 3 multiplayer beta.” If you were in the former category you’ll be pleased to know that in the hands of Ruffian Games, Crackdown 2 fixes nearly every complaint a fan had with the original, creating a sequel you’ll certainly enjoy. And if you were in the latter category good news: the Halo Reach beta ended over a month ago, so there’s no irrational fear of bandwagons to keep you from giving this unique shooter a try.

In Crackdown 2 you again play as an Agency super soldier who, with a bit of training, can leap small buildings in a single bound or pick up and throw cars like bowling balls. Tasked with aiding the Agency’s Peace Keepers in cleaning up the streets of Pacific City once again, you’ll need every available weapon to fend off militant activists known as the Cell, who come at you with miniguns, armored battle buses and homing rockets. In case a heavily armed, well organized street gang weren’t trouble enough, when the sun goes down you’ll also have to contend with Freaks (virally mutated former citizens) who come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and levels of lethality.

Set ten years after the ending of the first game, your main goal will be to put an end to the virus, stopping the mutated citizens and dealing with Cell permanently. But there’s more to do in this sandbox than shoot bad guys — with hundreds of orbs to find and collect, rooftop and car races to participate in, a couple different kinds of stunt hoops to get through and the ability to do it all with three other friends at the same time, Crackdown 2 improves upon the original formula and offers a great excuse to dive in and have some fun.

Upgrade your Agility to level 5 and you may not even need to hit the jump…

“I’d like to thank me for flying me airlines.”

If you’re new to this series then know that you don’t have to have played the first game to understand what’s going on. The beginning of the game quickly gives you the basics and introduces you to what is now a derelict Pacific City, with burned out and half destroyed buildings and a populace reeling from some mysterious viral outbreak. After learning about your Agent and his five core skills (Agility, Firearms, Strength, Explosives and Driving) you are unleashed on the world to explore and grow however you see fit. 

Likely you will spend the next several hours jumping around the city, killing Cell and Freaks. Although jumping and grabbing onto ledges to ascend buildings can be finicky (still), the killing part is much improved. The Cell have taken the place of the gangs you may have fought the first time around, but the Freaks are new, and are best described as a mixture between zombies (the unique Left 4 Dead kind, not the shambling George Romero kind) and vampires (the light hating Dusk till Dawn kind, not the teen angst Twilight kind). Taking back Pacific City is a process of regaining Tactical Locations, closing Freak breaches and powering up Absorption Units.

What that means is that there will be shooting. Lots and lots of shooting. And that’s basically it. Crackdown 2 actually has less of a story than the original, which is a bit hard to believe if you’ve played the game before. As far as the main plot goes, all you’ll really be doing is finding Absorption Units, powering them up, then going to a marked location to call in and detonate an ultraviolet radiation bomb in some massive Freak lair. Occasionally an Absorption Unit will suffer from a little case of beamus interruptus, but that’s as complicated as things get.

I promise the targeting is better, even though the above Agent is clearly MISSING.

There are a host of audio logs (just over 50) that you can find hidden throughout the city which will give you a bit more back story behind the cause of the virus outbreak and who is culpable, but beyond that, don’t expect to find any sort of moral impetus behind your cloned Agent’s actions. In fact, if you go looking for morality here, you probably won’t like what you find. Although the game treats it like it’s some big secret, given the ending of the last game and the way the Agency came out as essentially an evil mastermind, it seems a bit odd right out the gate that in Crackdown 2 you run around with super hero powers playing the role of what feels more and more like a villain.

Before crying foul, saying that this is a separate game that should be considered independently, the opening cutscene of Crackdown 2, for whatever strange reason, does its own fair share of heavy handed foreshadowing and finger pointing directly at the head of the Agency. The game opens with a press conference taking place, during which a bomb goes off killing several reporters. But just before the explosion, the head of the Agency (who is fielding several hostile, hard hitting questions from the journalists) looks at his watch, sees a red light go off, and then ducks behind his podium. And every audio log you happen to find after that just implicates Agency corruption more and more. I’d love to say that such info is a spoiler, but story nuance and subtlety isn’t Crackdown 2’s forte. But just in case you really did consider that a spoiler, allow me to make it up to you: go see Titanic — the ending will blow your freakin’ mind!

What Crackdown 2 does best is action and developer Ruffian Games seems to have really paid attention to every little issue about the combat in the original game, improving on a host of what were only minor annoyances before to create a truly polished experience. For example, when targeting a gang member in the first Crackdown and filling him full of lead, your target remained locked until you released the aim trigger and you ended up wasting bullets on a corpse. Now, when someone’s dead they’re dead and your reticule automatically snaps to the next closest target. It’s a great feature when you’re in the thick of combat and fighting for your life. It’s a not so great feature when you spend five minutes climbing onto a roof where one bad guy happens to be standing next to an exploding barrel — here, automatic fire isn’t your friend, unless your friends throw you off roofs and necessitate skin grafts.

He’s a plastique surgeon. Get it!?!

Another welcome upgrade to the combat system is the simple fact that when you press the melee button, your Agent kicks or punches the closest target — again, not so great if that target is explosive, but absolutely wonderful when you are completely surrounded by a throng of Freaks who are just begging to help you increase your Strength ability. (Of course, that’s a major improvement to the original Crackdown, where pressing the melee button caused you to attack whatever was directly in front of you — i.e. thin air — and caused gamers to attack what was directly in front of them — i.e. their controllers.)

Another great feature implemented here is that for the most part, due to the plague, the civilian population is relatively sparse, particularly at night when the Freaks come out in great numbers, absolutely clogging the streets and just begging to help you increase your Driving ability. With Peace Keepers and civvies not constantly getting in your way anymore, you don’t have to worry about collateral damage as much, and the consequences of it are now reduced to the point that it’s almost negligible. Feel free to power slide through crowds of Freaks and lap up those juicy purple orbs, ignoring the infrequent pedestrian/speed bump. Oh and by the way, you can go full throttle at any Cell members now — bad guys no longer dodge out of the way, so no more sneaking up on people with your SUV in order to run them over.

“I really think you are underestimating the sneakiness.”

The icing on the combat cake is your new arsenal. Upgrading your Firearms skills gradually unlocks bigger and better weapons to lug around like rocket turrets and the harpoon gun, but the most interesting addition is the UV shotgun. Firing a spread of ultraviolet light, it’s the best way to disintegrate the day-hating Freaks Unfortunately the shotgun and UV grenades are the only two weapons of their kind, which feels like an opportunity for tactically choosing your weapons loadout was missed.

Once you’ve finished playing through the main story (which only takes about five or six hours — yes, it’s that short) you are still welcome to go back and explore Pacific City, which is what really gives the game a long life. The bad news is that yes, there are five hundred Agility orbs to locate, as well as three hundred hidden orbs, eighty co-op only orbs (you need at least two players to collect these) and forty-five renegade orbs (like regular orbs but they run away from you) for a grand total of nearly one thousand collectibles.

One hundred twenty-seven…………………. One hundred twenty-eight……………

Fortunately for you, any collectible that you have previously detected (but not collected) shows up on your city map. Hit the back button and you can scroll through the achievements list, find the one related to the orbs you’re looking for and see exactly how many you have left to find on a particular island. Although you can’t set waypoints for any map location (or even zoom in and out to get a bigger picture of the islands), what you can do is go to that general location and then simply press up on the directional pad in-game to ping your radar. A little colored blip will show up briefly on your minimap and although it won’t indicate whether the orb is above or below you, after a brief recharge period you can ping your map as many times as needed until you find your quarry.

Of course, the real draw is doing everything mentioned above with three other players. The ability to have four Agents running around wreaking havoc at the same time makes the game almost endlessly fun to tool around in, and there are even several achievements that can only be accomplished with other players in your game. Other multiplayer features aren’t quite as much of an attraction though.

Crackdown 2 includes team and solo deathmatches, which on the surface look a lot like third-person Halo games with people jumping everywhere in red and blue armor, firing rockets and punching each other. But the maps, which are zoned off portions of Pacific City, have a lot of verticality to them and can make finding opponents difficult, even in a full lobby of sixteen players. This problem only worsens when there are four to six players in the game which, honestly, is the inevitable fate of any online multiplayer experience without “Halo” or “Call of Duty” in its title. The only other offering is a mode called Rocket Tag, which is a fun novelty that soon wears off.

Flying machines of death firing infinite rockets can make multiplayer unbalanced. Ya think!?

Despite the fact that the PVP multiplayer leaves something to be desired, the four player co-op is a unique offering that few other games can match. The story doesn’t really reflect the same level of quality that Ruffian Games is clearly capable of, given the changes that were made to the combat system, but that may have been more by choice than lack of attention. Ruffian seems to have gone to great lengths to solve what problems existed from the first game and there’s little doubt in my mind that, if enough fans clamor for it, the other aspects of the title I’ve taken issue with could just as easily be remedied as well (eventually).

Hopes for the next sequel aside, what we currently have on our hands is not only an outstanding single-player shooter, but a great co-op sandbox to run around and have fun in. The super hero Agent hook is still easily set, despite the fact that you don’t always quite feel the hero part. There’s plenty of structured activity to keep people coming back for more, but fans of the first game (and those with a good imagination) will be able to enjoy the game the most. There’s still a great deal here to entice anyone that wasn’t quite sure they wanted to bite the last time, so long as they don’t expect a deeply moving rollercoaster of a plot as unpredictable as Valkyrie (which kept me guessing right up until the end).

Final Score: B+